Helen E. Hokinson Cartoons for The New Yorker
Collection
Call Number: YCAL MSS 1084
Scope and Contents
The collection consists of more than 340 cartoons, cover drawings, and concept sketches in ink, pencil, watercolor, crayon, and charcoal on paper that were created for The New Yorker magazine by Helen E. Hokinson. Many were signed by the artist and few are dated except by stamps and notes applied by the magazine’s production staff. The drawings that are dated range from 1926 to 1949, but in general the works are chiefly from the 1930s and 1940s. There are more than thirty drawings or sketches meant for covers (easily recognizable by the distinctive color bar running along the left edge of the image) as well as several multi-panel cartoons that read like storyboards (for example, Series VI, drawing 64: So You’re Going to Have Your Picture Taken!).
The drawings primarily feature situations in which Hokinson’s iconic matrons interact with their friends, cultural colleagues, children, pets, sales clerks, and their stalwart household staff members (two examples in Series VII: in drawing 78, a matron stepping off a train tells her driver, "I have two sheep in the baggage car, Gordon, they're for the lawn." and in drawing 76, a matron alone with her housekeeper says, "Alice, go look at my engagement pad and tell me what I'm doing."). The city and suburban scenarios are those Hokinson knew well: department stores, women’s clubs, box offices, amateur theater stages, pet shows, cocktail parties, and anywhere that American tourists would be seen abroad. Much of her humor is visual and not always obvious from a caption (Series VII, drawing 10, "Where are the guns, please?" features a woman and small boy in the stuffed animal section of a toy store; Series VI, drawing 63, "Do you all give up?" depicts a game of charades in which the matron is on the floor posed as a sphinx) and many of the references, such as those to cosmetics magnate Richard Hudnut, theater star Maurice Evans, United States Vice President Henry A. Wallace, and to Briarcliff Junior College, are no longer relatable in the twenty-first century. However, the gentle humor that Hokinson applied to her ladies and their circumstances both mirrors and transcends its time, and some of the cartoons—in particular the matron whispering to a Paris bookstall attendant in French about James Joyce’s banned Ulysses (Series VII, drawing 8, published May 22, 1930) or walking out on a performance of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (remarking “Mr. Damrosch will hear of this.” in Series VII, drawing 26), or the two matrons in an art gallery quizzically circling Constantin Brancusi's Bird in Space (Series VII, drawing 173, published February 6, 1926) or pausing to query a Southwest pueblo resident about the legendary Mabel Dodge Luhan (Series IV, drawing 12, published July 9, 1938)—present cultural markers still of interest to readers many decades afterward.
Drawings that carry on their versos the magazine’s copyright stamp, serial numbers in blue or black crayon, and directions to the printer regarding image size and placement, indicate that they had been published. Those without may be rejected ideas or weren’t submitted for consideration, and in six cases the drawings are accompanied by notes (usually rejection notes) from James M. Geraghty (1905-1983), art editor at The New Yorker from 1939 to 1973; one mentions Harold Ross (1892-1951), the magazine’s founder and editor-in-chief. However, although unmarked, some of the drawings may have appeared in the magazine’s category of "covering art"—groups or sequences of images which appeared on a page or two, usually with a one- or two-word caption—or as vignettes in the “Goings On” or “Talk of the Town” sections of the magazine. In two cases the collection holds drawings that are in both cartoon and cover formats: the three matrons touring Mexico in Series VI, drawing 46, appear in a cover design in Series VII, drawing 68, and the tennis club group in Series VII, drawing 104, is also in a cover sketch in Series VII, drawing 18.
In addition to the cartoons there are three watercolor views of rural France in Series III (drawings 39-41) taken when Hokinson visited there in the late 1920s, and four unidentified watercolor views in Series VII (drawings 73, 79, 129, and 143) as well as two printed pieces: a progressive proof of a Hokinson cover on the June 22, 1946, issue (Series VII, number 17) and in the same series, number 69 is a detached Hokinson cover from January 5, 1946. Also present is a 1931 cartoon by Perry Barlow (1892-1977), her colleague at The New Yorker (Series VI, drawing 78).
The drawings in this collection were among a larger group left as a bequest by Helen Hokinson to her friend Helen Mobert (1896-1979). Before they were transferred to Mobert, James Reid Parker (1909-1984), Hokinson’s executor and primary caption writer, added captions on the drawings which had none. In the subsequent thirty years, Mobert sold most of the drawings she had inherited, and at her death the residue passed to Parker. Mobert had written new captions on many of the drawings; Parker erased those captions and rewrote the originals, either from memory when the caption was his own or from published sources when the drawing was executed before he began collaborating with Hokinson. The captions in the box and folder list below were transcribed as they appear on the drawings. Those with quotation marks indicate that a character in the cartoon is speaking. Those without quotes are simply titles applied by Hokinson or Parker, and [descriptions in brackets] are for drawings with no caption or title present.
The drawings primarily feature situations in which Hokinson’s iconic matrons interact with their friends, cultural colleagues, children, pets, sales clerks, and their stalwart household staff members (two examples in Series VII: in drawing 78, a matron stepping off a train tells her driver, "I have two sheep in the baggage car, Gordon, they're for the lawn." and in drawing 76, a matron alone with her housekeeper says, "Alice, go look at my engagement pad and tell me what I'm doing."). The city and suburban scenarios are those Hokinson knew well: department stores, women’s clubs, box offices, amateur theater stages, pet shows, cocktail parties, and anywhere that American tourists would be seen abroad. Much of her humor is visual and not always obvious from a caption (Series VII, drawing 10, "Where are the guns, please?" features a woman and small boy in the stuffed animal section of a toy store; Series VI, drawing 63, "Do you all give up?" depicts a game of charades in which the matron is on the floor posed as a sphinx) and many of the references, such as those to cosmetics magnate Richard Hudnut, theater star Maurice Evans, United States Vice President Henry A. Wallace, and to Briarcliff Junior College, are no longer relatable in the twenty-first century. However, the gentle humor that Hokinson applied to her ladies and their circumstances both mirrors and transcends its time, and some of the cartoons—in particular the matron whispering to a Paris bookstall attendant in French about James Joyce’s banned Ulysses (Series VII, drawing 8, published May 22, 1930) or walking out on a performance of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (remarking “Mr. Damrosch will hear of this.” in Series VII, drawing 26), or the two matrons in an art gallery quizzically circling Constantin Brancusi's Bird in Space (Series VII, drawing 173, published February 6, 1926) or pausing to query a Southwest pueblo resident about the legendary Mabel Dodge Luhan (Series IV, drawing 12, published July 9, 1938)—present cultural markers still of interest to readers many decades afterward.
Drawings that carry on their versos the magazine’s copyright stamp, serial numbers in blue or black crayon, and directions to the printer regarding image size and placement, indicate that they had been published. Those without may be rejected ideas or weren’t submitted for consideration, and in six cases the drawings are accompanied by notes (usually rejection notes) from James M. Geraghty (1905-1983), art editor at The New Yorker from 1939 to 1973; one mentions Harold Ross (1892-1951), the magazine’s founder and editor-in-chief. However, although unmarked, some of the drawings may have appeared in the magazine’s category of "covering art"—groups or sequences of images which appeared on a page or two, usually with a one- or two-word caption—or as vignettes in the “Goings On” or “Talk of the Town” sections of the magazine. In two cases the collection holds drawings that are in both cartoon and cover formats: the three matrons touring Mexico in Series VI, drawing 46, appear in a cover design in Series VII, drawing 68, and the tennis club group in Series VII, drawing 104, is also in a cover sketch in Series VII, drawing 18.
In addition to the cartoons there are three watercolor views of rural France in Series III (drawings 39-41) taken when Hokinson visited there in the late 1920s, and four unidentified watercolor views in Series VII (drawings 73, 79, 129, and 143) as well as two printed pieces: a progressive proof of a Hokinson cover on the June 22, 1946, issue (Series VII, number 17) and in the same series, number 69 is a detached Hokinson cover from January 5, 1946. Also present is a 1931 cartoon by Perry Barlow (1892-1977), her colleague at The New Yorker (Series VI, drawing 78).
The drawings in this collection were among a larger group left as a bequest by Helen Hokinson to her friend Helen Mobert (1896-1979). Before they were transferred to Mobert, James Reid Parker (1909-1984), Hokinson’s executor and primary caption writer, added captions on the drawings which had none. In the subsequent thirty years, Mobert sold most of the drawings she had inherited, and at her death the residue passed to Parker. Mobert had written new captions on many of the drawings; Parker erased those captions and rewrote the originals, either from memory when the caption was his own or from published sources when the drawing was executed before he began collaborating with Hokinson. The captions in the box and folder list below were transcribed as they appear on the drawings. Those with quotation marks indicate that a character in the cartoon is speaking. Those without quotes are simply titles applied by Hokinson or Parker, and [descriptions in brackets] are for drawings with no caption or title present.
Dates
- 1926 - 1949
Creator
Language of Materials
Captions in English.
Conditions Governing Access
The materials are open for research.
Conditions Governing Use
The Helen E. Hokinson Cartoons for The New Yorker is the physical property of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Literary rights, including copyright, belong to the authors or their legal heirs and assigns. For further information, consult the appropriate curator.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Gift of James Reid Parker, 1980.
Arrangement
Organized into seven series by the number of the portfolio in which they were received. Within each series the drawings are arranged in order of a numbered inventory that accompanied the collection.
Extent
25.42 Linear Feet (15 boxes)
Catalog Record
A record for this collection is available in Orbis, the Yale University Library catalog
Persistent URL
Overview
The collection consists of more than 340 cartoons, cover drawings, and concept sketches in ink, pencil, watercolor, crayon, and charcoal on paper that were created for The New Yorker magazine by Helen E. Hokinson.
Helen E. Hokinson (1893-1949)
Helen Elna Hokinson was born on June 29, 1893, in Mendota, Illinois, the daughter of Mary Wilcox Hokinson and Adolph Hokinson, a farm machinery salesman. After graduating from Mendota High School in 1913, she attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago, and drew fashion illustrations for local department stores. Moving to New York in 1920, she studied at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (later the Parsons School of Design) and worked as an illustrator for several of the city's fine department stores including Lord & Taylor and B. Altman and Company. Equally interested in cartooning, Hokinson submitted a drawing to The New Yorker within months of the magazine's founding in 1925, and was hired to make sketches at cultural events in the city such as art exhibitions or dance and music recitals. Thereafter the magazine published nearly 1,800 of her cartoons and vignettes within its covers, and sixty-eight of her watercolor drawings on its covers, until just after her death in 1949.
Helen Hokinson became one of the best-known of The New Yorker cartoonists, in company with Charles Addams, Peter Arno, Whitney Darrow Jr, George Price, and James Thurber. Working from her apartment in New York's Gramercy Park neighborhood or her cottage in Silvermine, Connecticut, she created her own genre of civic-minded “Hokinson women,” described by Richard Merkin in a short profile of the artist published in The New Yorker in 1994: “Her dowagers and clubwomen were generally edging up on their fifties, were overweight (but intent on doing something about it), and were addicted to chapeaus that somehow always looked both chic and wrong. They were women of cheerful mien, earnest in their cultural and horticultural pursuits, and inclined toward the ingenuous. It was easy to laugh at them, but something about them—perhaps their energy, perhaps their tiny feet—made you laugh gently and with affection.” Hokinson set her subjects in women’s club meetings, community theatricals, country fairs, and flower and pet shows as well as at the opera, art museums, and, naturally, a wide variety of retail shops. Many of her early cartoons were published without captions, but eventually she, and most of the magazine’s other cartoonists, began to use captions assigned by editors or staff writers, some of whom would first suggest captions for which Hokinson would then fashion an image.
In 1931 James Reid Parker, who wrote humorous pieces and light sketches for The New Yorker, met Helen Hokinson and the two became a professional team with Parker supplying captions for Hokinson’s drawings. They met once a week, on Fridays, to exchange and develop ideas, and communicated daily by postcard if either was traveling. Their arrangement continued until Hokinson’s death in an airplane crash on November 1, 1949; Parker served as the executor of her estate.
The editors wrote an appreciative farewell to Helen Hokinson in their November 12, 1949, issue: “Miss Hokinson’s first drawing appeared in The New Yorker on July 4, 1925. The magazine was less than five months old then, and it was singularly fortunate in finding, at its difficult beginning, an artist of such rare and gentle distinction. In the years since then, her pictures have appeared in these pages almost every week, and the ladies she drew have become perhaps the most widely known and certainly the most affectionately cherished of any characters we have introduced to our readers. If satire is defined as an exposure of anyone’s weakness, she was not a satirist at all, or even a humorist, if there is any implication of harshness in that. Her work was the product of loving observation and a boundless delight in all absurdity, none more than that she found in herself, and the pleasure she gave other people was really a reflection of her own.”
Helen Hokinson’s cartoons were published in three collections during her lifetime, So You're Going to Buy a Book! (Minton, Balch & Co., 1931), My Best Girls (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1941), and When Were You Built? (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1948), and three after her death: The Ladies, God Bless 'em (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1950), There are Ladies Present (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1952), and The Hokinson Festival (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1956).
Helen Hokinson became one of the best-known of The New Yorker cartoonists, in company with Charles Addams, Peter Arno, Whitney Darrow Jr, George Price, and James Thurber. Working from her apartment in New York's Gramercy Park neighborhood or her cottage in Silvermine, Connecticut, she created her own genre of civic-minded “Hokinson women,” described by Richard Merkin in a short profile of the artist published in The New Yorker in 1994: “Her dowagers and clubwomen were generally edging up on their fifties, were overweight (but intent on doing something about it), and were addicted to chapeaus that somehow always looked both chic and wrong. They were women of cheerful mien, earnest in their cultural and horticultural pursuits, and inclined toward the ingenuous. It was easy to laugh at them, but something about them—perhaps their energy, perhaps their tiny feet—made you laugh gently and with affection.” Hokinson set her subjects in women’s club meetings, community theatricals, country fairs, and flower and pet shows as well as at the opera, art museums, and, naturally, a wide variety of retail shops. Many of her early cartoons were published without captions, but eventually she, and most of the magazine’s other cartoonists, began to use captions assigned by editors or staff writers, some of whom would first suggest captions for which Hokinson would then fashion an image.
In 1931 James Reid Parker, who wrote humorous pieces and light sketches for The New Yorker, met Helen Hokinson and the two became a professional team with Parker supplying captions for Hokinson’s drawings. They met once a week, on Fridays, to exchange and develop ideas, and communicated daily by postcard if either was traveling. Their arrangement continued until Hokinson’s death in an airplane crash on November 1, 1949; Parker served as the executor of her estate.
The editors wrote an appreciative farewell to Helen Hokinson in their November 12, 1949, issue: “Miss Hokinson’s first drawing appeared in The New Yorker on July 4, 1925. The magazine was less than five months old then, and it was singularly fortunate in finding, at its difficult beginning, an artist of such rare and gentle distinction. In the years since then, her pictures have appeared in these pages almost every week, and the ladies she drew have become perhaps the most widely known and certainly the most affectionately cherished of any characters we have introduced to our readers. If satire is defined as an exposure of anyone’s weakness, she was not a satirist at all, or even a humorist, if there is any implication of harshness in that. Her work was the product of loving observation and a boundless delight in all absurdity, none more than that she found in herself, and the pleasure she gave other people was really a reflection of her own.”
Helen Hokinson’s cartoons were published in three collections during her lifetime, So You're Going to Buy a Book! (Minton, Balch & Co., 1931), My Best Girls (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1941), and When Were You Built? (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1948), and three after her death: The Ladies, God Bless 'em (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1950), There are Ladies Present (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1952), and The Hokinson Festival (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1956).
Processing Information
This finding aid was produced from an existing inventory. All captions and descriptions in the box and folder list were taken from the inventory, although it is unclear if the inventory was made by the donor, James Reid Parker, or by library staff when the collection arrived in 1980.
Former call number: Za MS +1
Former call number: Za MS +1
- American wit and humor, Pictorial
- Artists -- United States
- Artists -- United States -- 20th Century
- Barlow, Perry, 1892-1977
- Cartoonists -- United States
- Cartoonists -- United States -- 20th Century
- Cartoons (humorous images) -- United States -- 20th Century
- Drawings (visual works) -- United States -- 20th Century
- Geraghty, James M., 1905-1983
- Hokinson, Helen E. (Helen Elna), 1893-1949
- Illustrations (layout features) -- United States -- 20th Century
- New Yorker (New York, N.Y. : 1925)
- Parker, James Reid, 1909-1984
- Watercolors (paintings) -- United States -- 19th century
Creator
- Hokinson, Helen E. (Helen Elna), 1893-1949 (Artist)
- Barlow, Perry, 1892-1977 (Artist)
- Geraghty, James M., 1905-1983 (Associated name)
- Parker, James Reid, 1909-1984 (Associated name)
- Title
- Guide to the Helen E. Hokinson Cartoons for The New Yorker
- Status
- Completed
- Author
- by Sandra Markham
- Date
- 2016
- Description rules
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
- Language of description note
- Finding aid written in English.
Part of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Repository
Location
121 Wall Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Opening Hours
Access Information
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